Improbable Success

As Vice President Nixon started off on his cold-war journey to the U.S.S.R., the Administration harbored doubts as to whether the trip could really be expected to accomplish very much--and Dick Nixon shared them. Nixon expected Soviet chieftains to be cool and suspicious. feared that Nikita Khrushchev might try to snub him and keep him away from the Russian people. But by the time Nixon headed back to Washington this week, there were no doubts at all that the trip was a diplomatic and sociological success far beyond what anybody could have hoped or imagined. During his improbable fortnight behind the Iron Curtain. Nixon:

P: Reached over the head of the U.S.S.R.'s rulers, particularly in a remarkable speech on Soviet TV (see Foreign Relations) to get across to the Soviet people the U.S. side of the cold-war story.

P: Made clear to the Soviet people that the U.S. wants peace and friendship (mir i druzhba) with their country.

P: Drove home persuasively the point that, much as the U.S. wants peace and friendship, it cannot and will not be pushed around--and that in the nuclear age, attempts to push around add up to deadly folly.

P: Left behind in Moscow, in Leningrad, in the off-limits-to-Westerners industrial centers of Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk a priceless fund of good will and friendliness toward the U.S.

P: Prompted a moving ovation from thousands upon thousands of Poles with his all-but-unheralded arrival in Warsaw (see FOREIGN NEWS), striking a dramatic contrast with the coolness of Khrushchev's own reception three weeks before.

All told, Nixon's performance was an extraordinary phenomenon in the new history of diplomacy and a striking vindication of the President who sent him. First, it was a performance of sheer physical endurance that only a fairly young and rugged man could have withstood: It was a grueling test of his person-to-person debating skill, of his way with crowds, of his knowledge and understanding of the Soviet Union and--fundamentally--of his knowledge and understanding of his own nation. To the thousands of Russians and Poles who saw him, Nixon was the personification of a kind of disciplined vigor that belied tales of the decadent and limp-wristed West.

Whatever the long-range results of the handshaking, the oratorical sparring, the wide-ranging travels, it seemed likely that the first, short-range result would be a trip by Nikita Khrushchev to the U.S. "On balance," said Nixon in a press conference just before leaving Moscow for Warsaw, "I believe that some time Mr. Khrushchev should be invited to come to the U.S." Khrushchev, he said, "still has some very real misconceptions regarding both our policy and the attitude of our people. A trip would serve to reduce and to remove these misconceptions."

Inspecting Nixon's Boeing 707 jet, Khrushchev said he would like to visit the U.S. "when the time is ripe." In Geneva, where the Big Four foreign ministers' conference sputtered toward a stalemated end, word leaked that the U.S. had sounded out its allies on inviting Khrushchev and found them in favor.

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